How to reach #1 in Yahoo! Part 2

KEI - Keyword Effectiveness Index. The value of a keyword or keyword phrase that helps a web site reach the #1 position in search engines by comparing how often the keyword or keyword phrase is used and comparing it to how many web sites are using that keyword or keyword phrase to market their site.

In part one of this article I discussed how you can thoroughly research and pick the right keywords for your web site. You can read part one of this web design SEO advice here. http://www.theinternetpresence.com/business-article-26.htm Part two of this article will show you how to take your list of keywords created from part one and narrow it down to the most effective keywords to use. Lets start with the KEI rating of the keywords.

You can find many free KEI tools on the internet. I personally use one that was part of a $500 software package, but you can find many tools on the internet for free. My advice for this is to try a few of them out and stick with the tools that show generally the same results and toss the ones that dont. Even with the software package I bought I still use wordtracker and overture to compare my results.

List your keywords in the first column of a table. I use Microsoft Excel, but you can use anything that works. In the second, third or more columns list the number of times that keyword was used per day or month. I use one column for wordtracker, one column for overture, and one column for my software package. Be suspicious of the keywords that dont show the same results on all three and consider tossing them out. For example if one column says it searched 300 times per day, but the other two do not even show it being searched at all I would toss that keyword out. In the next column type in the KEI rating of that keyword. And in the next column, if you have a tool that allows it, enter how often the competition uses that keyword in a competition column. Enter in the numbers for this data for all of the keywords listed in your table. Now we can start to narrow down the list.

Look at your keyword KEI ratings and compare them to each other. Toss out the keywords that have a low KEI rating. Next look over the list of keywords again and think to yourself, "Will someone that types that in want to visit my site". If not, toss out the keywords. Ask yourself, "Will someone who types in that keyword be likely to be profitable for me". If not, toss out those keywords as well. Look at how often your competition uses a keyword in your competition column. If it has a good KEI rating and over 17,000,000 web sites are using it then it will be hard to get to #1. Consider tossing these keywords out also.

For example I concentrated on the search term, web development contractor which had a great KEI rating and was hardly used by competition. I tweaked my site for this keyword and now if you type in web development contractor into MSN youll find out that I hold the number one position. And have held it for over a month now. In addition if you type in business presence on the web, or Internet Presence youll see me floating around the top 5 along with some other search terms. Perhaps I should rename this article How I reached #1 in MSN The search term web design had a good KEI rating, but the competition was over 17,000,000 web sites using that search term. Perhaps Ill feel lucky and try for that one next.

I keep narrowing down my list until I have five of the best keywords to use for my web site. I take those 5 keywords and type them into the top 3 search engines and list the top 10 sites that show up with each keyword. So you will have a list of 50 sites per each search engine you used. To get a good general ranking in all of the search engines, I combine the 3 lists of 50 sites into one big list of 150 web sites for comparison. Alphabetize the list. Did you notice something Some sites are listed three or more times! Toss out the sites that only show up once and this will narrow down your list of 150 considerably. Take the top five web sites that show up with the keyword you want and list them in another page. It is now time to pick apart there sites and discover why they are there!

Research the five sites using your keyword and compare them to each other. You have to research the sites page that landed on the search engine for these factors:

Is the keyword in the tag If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the description tag If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the keywords tag If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the content of the site If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the headings H1-H6 of the page If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the links of the page If so, where is it placed, and how often.

Is the keyword in the alt image attributes If so, where is it placed, and how often.
alt image attributes are the words that pop up when you move a cursor over a picture

If you want I can do this analysis for you. Just send me up to 3 keyword phrases and 2 web sites for comparison and for $25 youll get a much more detailed report on both sites. This will save you a lot of time! Keyword research usually runs about $240 to $360 if you have me do it.

Examine the five sites next to each other and concentrate on building your site on things that they have in common and do one number better than them. Ignore building your site in the areas that are not consistent between the five. You then should be getting good results when your site is indexed next. There are other ways to help increase the ranking of your web site like linking. Linking plays a very important role with Google, but there are a number of rules for linking to make it effective. That is a whole new article in itself.

This may seem to be a lot of work, but is well worth it. Some companies charge $1000 to $1500 per month for doing this service and what I typed into these two articles is 75% of what they do. I have my system tweaked now so that it takes me roughly 8 hours to do the keyword research and 2 or 3 days to optimize my site for it. You can do this too!

Be looking for more articles soon!

Copyright © Michael Rock
Web development contractor Web Design and Hosting
Internet Presence
www.TheInternetPresence.com